…such do I love it. Today it brings us an op-ed piece by Alejandro Toledo, former president of Peru, concerning Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’ recent silencing of a television station that gave time to critics of his administration.

There’s also an editorial about this week’s ruling by military judges that Gitmo is (brace yourselves) using illegal methods to try its inmates, and in many cases, detaining them unlawfully. And using information obtained through torture. And this violates the Geneva Conventions. You know, all that stuff we’ve known forever, but we can only hope (lest we despair) that these new rulings are a step in a humane direction.

Oh, and Maureen Dowd wrote some utter tripe wherein she compares Barak Obama to Batman and makes Star Wars references in order to enhance her liberal street cred. Don’t waste your time.

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8 responses to “Sometimes I spread the NYT out on the floor and just roll around in it…”

HOW does she still have that column, I ask you? She’s the token female columnist, who always tries for snark and winds up with tripe. She has all the wit of a charging rhino and twice the vitriol. Yet she still has a syndicated column, while many better commentators do not.

It’s like how the NYTimes also occasionally publishes Althouse pieces. I mean, are they even reading what they print? Gyah.

(I also love the paper, as a general rule, but there are times when I wish I got certain articles in print so I could rip them to shreds. Meh.)

Megan writes of having to put on Arabic dress to do reporting in Saudi Arabia:

The sleeves, the length of it, always felt foreign, at first. But it never took long to work its alchemy, to plant the insecurity. After a day or two, the notion of appearing without the robe felt shocking. Stripped of the layers of curve-smothering cloth, my ordinary clothes suddenly felt revealing, even garish. To me, the abaya implied that a woman’s body is a distraction and an interruption, a thing that must be hidden from view lest it haul the society into vice and disarray. The simple act of wearing the robe implanted that self-consciousness by osmosis.

I am so SICK of Maureen Dowd! She always sounds like a 7th grader. Talking about the hair, the girlfriend (wife), etc. I feel like she reinforces the idiotic notion that women can’t write seriously and smartly about politics. ARghhh!!!!

Just for the record, the TV station in question (Radio Caracas), did a lot more than just give air time to Chavez’s critics: it helped orchestrate an unconstitutional military coup against the guy. Also, all he did was let its broadcast license lapse, arguing (as many independent observers agreed) that the network had reneged on the requirement to serve the public interest without bias.

MoDo is fucking bonkers. It’s almost laughable, until you remember that her bitchy content-less takedowns of Al Gore as some smarty-pants girly-man helped put W in the White House and contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq.

Controlled by members of the country’s fabulously wealthy oligarchy including RCTV chief Marcel Granier, it saw Chavez and his “Bolivarian Revolution” on behalf of Venezuela’s majority poor as a threat.

RCTV’s most infamous effort to topple Chavez came during the April 11, 2002, coup attempt against him. For two days before the putsch, RCTV preempted regular programming and ran wall-to-wall coverage of a general strike aimed at ousting Chavez. A stream of commentators spewed nonstop vitriolic attacks against him — while permitting no response from the government.

Then RCTV ran nonstop ads encouraging people to attend a march on April 11 aimed at toppling Chavez and broadcast blanket coverage of the event. When the march ended in violence, RCTV and Globovision ran manipulated video blaming Chavez supporters for scores of deaths and injuries.

After military rebels overthrew Chavez and he disappeared from public view for two days, RCTV’s biased coverage edged fully into sedition. Thousands of Chavez supporters took to the streets to demand his return, but none of that appeared on RCTV or other television stations. RCTV News Director Andres Izarra later testified at National Assembly hearings on the coup attempt that he received an order from superiors at the station: “Zero pro-Chavez, nothing related to Chavez or his supporters…. The idea was to create a climate of transition and to start to promote the dawn of a new country.” While the streets of Caracas burned with rage, RCTV ran cartoons, soap operas and old movies such as “Pretty Woman.” On April 13, 2002, Granier and other media moguls met in the Miraflores palace to pledge support to the country’s coup-installed dictator, Pedro Carmona, who had eliminated the Supreme Court, the National Assembly and the Constitution.

Would a network that aided and abetted a coup against the government be allowed to operate in the United States? The U.S. government probably would have shut down RCTV within five minutes after a failed coup attempt — and thrown its owners in jail. Chavez’s government allowed it to continue operating for five years, and then declined to renew its 20-year license to use the public airwaves. It can still broadcast on cable or via satellite dish.